Mayan Toledano’s Photos Of Girl Soldiers

Words: Jana Roose. Photos: Mayan Toledano

Everywhere you look, you’ll see them. The streets, buses, and restaurants of Tel Aviv are dotted with figures in khaki, and most of the citizens wearing normal clothing either have been or will one day also be soldiers. Israel is one of just a handful of deeply militarised countries that conscripts both men and women for mandatory service. Females are allowed to serve in selected combat roles, but the majority are given non-combat duties doing office and communications work, cleaning bathrooms, repairing military infrastructure, or guard duty. At the age of 18, when most teens in the Western world are um-ing and ah-ing over whether to take a gap year, photographer Mayan Toledano, like most Israeli-born girls, served her mandatory two years in the Israel Defense Forces. More of a void to them, than a gap. “Looking back I mostly remember the frustration and my personal refusal to adapt during that time,” Toledano says, in an interview with Twin. “I barely took any photos during my service and I regret it; I felt so uncomfortable in the uniforms that I couldn’t imagine it as a subject at all.”

While most of us are sustained by oxygen and a solid breakfast, Toledano seems to be powered by something more mystical. Her world is built entirely on dreamy, pastel tones and nascent sensuality. She’s an artist hopelessly in love with femininity, so while dressed in the same uniform as thousands of others, she felt a deep loss of identity and yearned for her regular symbols of expression. For two years, her military duties stepped in front of her creativity and blocked it like an eclipse, and she struggled to produce anything but resentment for a service that was at odds with her political views, and the fact that she couldn’t be in school, making art or travelling.

Six years ago she relocated to New York City, and it was only once she had put distance between herself and her time in the army that she realised she needed to revisit and document the experience. “My hope was to capture [the girls] in a way that will somehow resist the violent idea of the military, looking at their disrupted youth and their teenage boredom as a refusal to become determined on goals they don’t share, within the system,” she told Ignant.

Toledano connected with four girls serving in the Israel Defence Forces and trailed them during their most intimate and ordinary moments; whether getting dressed in the bathroom, or killing time in their barracks, she captured them in a way that reclaims some individuality despite uniformity. There’s a strong cinematic influence that comes from Toledano’s love for coming-of-age films, the ones that capture the awkwardness of being misunderstood while grappling with your own identity. She approaches photography like a set designer, adding colour through light techniques and planting objects – like a pink bin liner – to be more playful. “Pink was always my favourite colour; I just see it everywhere almost in a magnetic way. I’m a very spacey person and I get distracted easily. Objects that are in that soft colour palette are the first thing I notice in a new space and I find it comforting,” she says to Twin.

The gaze is important to her too. You’ll notice it; eyes locked, slightly defiant, chin forward. Toledano believes women can’t really win in the way they’re represented – the female body is either capitalised for looking one way or shamed for looking another, so Toledano wanted to clip objectification by having the viewers’ eyes directly met, and challenged. Admittedly, in this series the girls are conventionally attractive and even intentionally synchronised, but her other projects do a better job of capturing the diversity of beauty.

Having grown up as a dancer who clicked easily and closely with groups of girls that were mediating pain and grace, Toledano’s one positive memory from her service was meeting girls from all over Israel, with very divergent backgrounds. She saw something special in the way they carved out personal space under demanding conditions, and buoyed each other in a male-dominated institution.

Toledano celebrates female friendship and girlhood on film and in textile too, as the co-founder of apparel label Me and You, which she runs with her best friend and artist Julia Baylis, and frequent collaborator Petra Collins (of Tavi Gevinson’s Rookie squad). Toledano continues to shoot the ‘Girl Soldiers’ series and has plans to turn it into a book in the next year.